Western Europe category: 1822 books

Bestselling classical historian Barry Strauss delivers “an exceptionally accessible history of the Roman Empire…much of Ten Caesars reads like a script for Game of Thrones” (The Wall Street Journal)****—a summation of three and a half centuries of the Roman Empire as seen through the lives...

“Fleshes out in vivid detail the entire story of the Screaming Eagles’ valiant struggle . . . This is must reading for any student of World War II history” (Kepler’s Military History). The Battered Bastards of Bastogne is the product of contributions by 530 soldiers who were on the...

In the gradual transformation of the old world of classical antiquity into the world with which the statesmen of today must deal, no man played a greater part than Charles the Great, King of the Franks and Emperor of Rome. The sharp lines of demarcation which we often draw between period and period,...

Bede (672 – 26 May 735), also referred to as Saint Bede or the Venerable Bede, was an English monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow, both in the Kingdom of Northumbria. Bede's monastery had access to a superb...

A history of the only Englishman to have sat on the papal throne, Adrian IV, known as Nicholas Breaskpeare, who was in office from 1154 to 1159.

Georgius Florentius Gregorius, better known to posterity as Gregory, Bishop of Tours, was born about 538 to a highly distinguished Gallo-Roman family in Clermont in the region of Auvergne. Best known for his 10-book Histories (often called the History of the Franks), Gregory left us detailed accounts...

Waged almost six centuries ago, the Battle of Agincourt still captivates. It is the classic underdog story, and generations have wondered how the English--outmanned by the French six to one--could have succeeded so bravely and brilliantly. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Juliet Barker paints a...

Milton Shulman (1913 – 2004) was a Canadian author, film and theatre critic. After the phoney war period Shulman signed up for the Canadian army, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Canadian Armoured Corps and posted to England in June 1943. Stationed in London as a captain he was assigned...

Tamar Herzog offers a road map to European law across 2,500 years that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By showing what European law was, where its iterations were found, who made and implemented it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances and reveals the law’s fragile malleability.

In White Innocence Gloria Wekker explores a central paradox of Dutch culture: the passionate denial of racial discrimination and colonial violence coexisting alongside aggressive racism and xenophobia. Accessing a cultural archive built over 400 years of Dutch colonial rule, Wekker fundamentally challenges...

Written by an expert on the Prussian army of the Napoleonic era, this is a fascinating insight into the 18th-century evolution of the Prussian forces into the war-winning troops of the final battles against Napoleon. Using contemporary materials including drill regulations, instructions, staff and...

The Normans remain an amazing political phenomenon. They emerged early in the 10th century and disappeared off the map by the mid–13th century. But in this time they conquered England, southern Italy, and Sicily, and established outposts in north Africa and the Levant. Trevor Rowley looks at their...

Captain Raymond Dronne's memoir of the regular army unit he commanded from the summer of 1943 to the spring of 1945, No. 9 Company of the Chad March Regiment, also known as 'La Nueve', a company made up almost entirely of Spanish veterans of the civil war and social revolution of 1936-1939 — anarchists,...

Why do the powerful medieval Knights Templar, the famed warriors of the Crusades, still intrigue many today? A secret society long shrouded in mystery, the Templars were believed to conduct mystical rituals, to guard the Holy Grail, and to possess the priceless treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem....